So if I understand correctly, Skinwalkers are basically watered-down, PC friendly versions of lycanthropes. Kind of like what Dhampirs are to full-fledged vampires, right?
I believe that is what is implied, yes.
And here I've been prepping a wild rager barbarian with a gaggle of bite-claw-scent-howl abilities for nothing. GJ Paizo.
And here I've been prepping a wild rager barbarian with a gaggle of bite-claw-scent-howl abilities for nothing. GJ Paizo.
Your barbarian will be served well with this volume! :]
Rules for making good-aligned lycanthropes of all types, that's all I want.
Rules for making good-aligned lycanthropes of all types, that's all I want.
Ummm....all you need for that is when stating up the NPC and you get to the Alignment section of the statblock is to put a good alignment down....you really don't need rules for that.
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See... I'm of the opinion that really, it shouldn't be terribly hard to abstract things down to "were-whatever".Well for Lycanthropes we have...
Wolf
Bat
Rat
Tiger
Bear
Boar
Shark
CrocMaybe there will more by the time this comes out.
If the bonuses are like those coming from a Beast Shape spell, from a very specific list, and a bear isn't +16 Str while a wolf is +2 Str or whatever, there shouldn't be a problem making them all balance out.
My dream 'Skinwalker' would be someone who actually skins animals they've defeated and wears their skins to transform into them. (And, like a selkie, can lose the ability to transform if they lose their skin, having to either reclaim it or create a new one by hunting down another creature of that type and making a new skin.)
But I'm pretty sure that's nothing like the race being designed (and might even work better as a Druid or Witch Archetype...). :)
Still hoping for Blood of the Planes/Elements though, for those 0HD native outsiders not lucky enough to be holy or unholy (Fetchlings are included here).
Ooh, yes please! Variant elemental-kin, similar to the various types of Tieflings and Aasimar, would float my boat.
Being terribly wrong in the head, I can't see Fetchlings without reading it as 'Felchlings.'
Which would be a very, very different race...
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I hope this book is very short on "roles." No roles is the perfect amount of roles for me.
I'd love to see some feats supporting the full animal form as well. Animal form is sort of the red-headed stepchild of lycanthrope forms in Pathfinder. It doesn't even get an entry in the Bestiary. (For my own lycanthropes, I've incorporated the animal and hybrid forms into one stat block since they are very similar.)
I just finished reading Van Richten's Guide to Werebeasts (that I purchased here on Paizo). It's chock-full of great ideas for a DM/GM of lycanthropes, and is pretty mechanics light.
I hope the new skinchanger player race does actually require using animal skins somehow, and isn't just the Pathfinder shifter-equivalent.
I plan to have dhampir vampires in my campaign, so maybe lycanthropy-infected skinchangers too, if the skinchanger proves cool. (Dhampir vampires are very potent since their racial abilities bonuses stack--especially the svetocher moroi.)
I still don't understand how the moroi "variant" dhampir is the svetocher when the standard dhampir should be the offspring of the standard vampire, right? I just run it as the "standard" dhampir and the svetocher are both possible offspring of a standard vampire (moroi) in equal measure.
Presently there's a guy in my campaign playing a kitsune because he wanted to play a lycanthrope and it was the closest available match in a 0-HD race. It's also just far enough from lycanthropy that the locals (in Ustalav) fear him, but he's technically not the enemy.
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I personally think roles are really good. I've seen plenty of newcomers at my FLGS that have flocked to Pathfinder and beeline to the roles. Helps them give their character concept wings when they don't know a lot about feats.
I just finished reading Van Richten's Guide to Werebeasts (that I purchased here on Paizo). It's chock-full of great ideas for a DM/GM of lycanthropes, and is pretty mechanics light.
Words can not express how much I LOVE every single one of those van richten guides...
Skinwalker? Sounds pretty awesome, though I wonder if the design is going to be like that of the Shifters.
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I personally think roles are really good. I've seen plenty of newcomers at my FLGS that have flocked to Pathfinder and beeline to the roles. Helps them give their character concept wings when they don't know a lot about feats.
Yeah. From what I've seen the roles are really good for either
a.) Introducing new players to how to guides to build character based around standard themes
or
b.) Show off how to build weird or very world specific character backgrounds like the grey knights.
That being said I feel like roles can go really wrong when we either get a whole bunch of them in one book or are presented with roles with options so obvious they feel like a waste of space. I feel like the big problem with blood of the night was that it kind of did both by giving us both too many roles (cutting deeply into the page count) and making some that were just plain obvious and easy to build after about 3 minutes of google searching like those for the vampire hunters.
I feel like especially in this instance, the need for roles is severely reduced since I think most of those buying this book will know what a classic werewolf hunter or werewolf will look like and can quickly start looking up what feats, skills, and equipment we need to pull it off.
I will say though I really want to see this book give me a kickass werewolf hunting themed gunslinger archetype. Can anyone say silver bullets?
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Silver bullets.
I'm Commander Shepard and silver is my favorite way to kill werewolves in Avistan.
Blood of the Night has actually grown on me some as a GM running vampires, but it was in the wrong product line and poorly named/targeted. Given the other products that follow that naming scheme, it should have focused more on dhampirs to follow the theme.
Blood of the Night also suffered from too many roles, but not nearly so much as People of the North did. You can barely turn two pages in People of the North without seeing a role or two.
I'm still holding out hope for Blood of the Moon.
Sounds like it could be very cool. I do hope there is rules for struggling with the condition and that sometimes the beast within wins out for a night.
Afflicted Lycanthropes get this already, so the "human" side winning once in a while...
If Natural Lycanthropes and Skinwalkers get something like this as well... could be interesting.
I wonder what RP value of the Skinwalker will be.
I wonder what RP value of the Skinwalker will be.
Around 10 RP. Kitsune are lesser shapechangers. At most I can see it being around 15 RP.
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Silver bullets.
I'm Commander Shepard and silver is my favorite way to kill werewolves in Avistan.
Blood of the Night has actually grown on me some as a GM running vampires, but it was in the wrong product line and poorly named/targeted. Given the other products that follow that naming scheme, it should have focused more on dhampirs to follow the theme.
Blood of the Night also suffered from too many roles, but not nearly so much as People of the North did. You can barely turn two pages in People of the North without seeing a role or two.
I'm still holding out hope for Blood of the Moon.
Yeah but in people of the north the amount of information on each ethnicity was pretty evenly distributed and focused. We would get a page or two on a race or ethnicity and a single roles listing for each. The problem with blood of the night was we got like 2 pages that were just roles and nothing else and only about 2 pages on dhampir which was what a lot of people felt was what the book was supposed to be for.
Are there any cultures in Golarion that are similar to the Dine?
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Updated to final cover image.
Feiya seems to be laughing. I wonder why?
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Feiya seems to be laughing. I wonder why?
Probably just cackling to sustain the duration on her hexes while everyone else gets into position.
I wonder if Feiya and Miss Werewolf are fighting over who gets the groom?
Nice new cover and in a wedding dress no less.
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Wow, first Warcraft lets me play a wolf-man in a tophat, and now we have a werewolf in a wedding dress.
I wonder if the family of the bride is still in the chapel eating the faces off of the family of the groom?
Then again, the architecture suggests that this is Soviet Ustalav, so the family of the groom could be turning into Dagon-worshipping fish-peeps and the lot of them be breaking into Sharks vs. Jets interpretive dance-offs, while the priest cowers in the back whimpering, 'Isn't *anyone* human in this cursed country?'
I believe it's the lady werewolf from Classic Horrors Revisited, she's hard on a gown.
I believe it's the lady werewolf from Classic Horrors Revisited, she's hard on a gown.She's ruff on her attire.
Its condition gives her paws.
Feiya seems to be laughing. I wonder why?
She is laughing because she has the Flight Hex active.
She is laughing because she just thinks a werewolf in a dress is funny...which started the fight in the first place.
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Well, it would appear as if that werewolf...
Startled the Witch :)
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Well, it would appear as if that werewolf...
Startled the Witch :)
...yeeeeeeeaaaaahhhh...?
I hope that the skinwalker somehow becomes PFS legal. Maybe there's a chance since in theory they would be common in certain parts of the Inner Sea area :D
Only 51 moons left till release.
I'm curious what the race will be like, what archetypes, feats, etc.
@ "Devil's Advocate": Yeah I remember that! Seems like it could be workable into this.
51 moons!?! That's like almost 5 years! I don't think I can wait that long ;)
Could be worse, we could be waiting 364 moons for this. :P
Makes me wonder though if this book will be "mostly" playable out-of-the-box if I were a PFS member. After all it is one of if not the first player companion to feature a race not shown anywhere else in Paizo's products.
Also other questions like
- Is it just werewolves that they can shape into?
- Will there be a prestige class just for Skinshifters?
- Are they harmonized with nature or not?
- Is this a possibility of "testing the waters" more for Shapeshifting races?
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Uhh I actually got to chat with some of the paizo staff on the floor about what we can expect from the skinwalker race. Now from what I heard they will get a change mechanic that sounds a bit like the shifter one from eberron (claws, bite, speed, etc.) except you are able to pick what boon you get every time you activate it. After that you get another bonus based on your lycanthropic lineage. What that bonus is I can't quite remember but from the sounds of it they have most if not all of the released lycans covered (distinctly remember hearing about some were bat options) and that this could effect what kind of stat bonuses you get, either as a way of selecting what abilities get bonuses or in addition to those you would normally receive assuming you have the flexible stats option.
Still hoping for a 'skinwalker' that's more like a Selkie and uses an animal skin to transform into one or more animal forms, perhaps even one that is born as an animal, and is 'skinwalking' among humans...
I'm suddenly imagining a conflict between the Skinwalkers and the Skinsaw Men.
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Still hoping for a 'skinwalker' that's more like a Selkie and uses an animal skin to transform into one or more animal forms, perhaps even one that is born as an animal, and is 'skinwalking' among humans...I'm suddenly imagining a conflict between the Skinwalkers and the Skinsaw Men.
"You stole my wolf skin and wore it while committing terrible murders, and now it's all bloody! Now my wolf is acting up..."
That would be pretty awesome.
Eberron Wolf Shifters in Pathfinder? Sounds awesome. Depending on what the Shifters give this time around it might actually make for some pretty funny builds.
Still hoping for a 'skinwalker' that's more like a Selkie and uses an animal skin to transform into one or more animal forms, perhaps even one that is born as an animal, and is 'skinwalking' among humans...
THIS....but alas, I think they will go the dumbed down lycanthrope route.